Robotic Process Automation for Web Data Extraction

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Automatically Extract and Integrate Business-Critical Web Data

When your business depends on data from the web,

manually collecting information from complex and dynamic

websites is neither scalable nor cost-effective. If you have

tried using open source web crawlers, web scrapers and

scripts, you’ve probably had limited success getting the data

you need. To compound the problem, data returned by these

tools is not readily usable and often requires business

analysts to cleanse and correct it before it can be turned into

usable information for research and services offerings. This

delay is a disadvantage for information providers, research

groups, online services and retailers and manufacturers who

require dynamic intelligence about products and pricing or

visibility into their channels and customers.

A simple web scraping tool can create more problems than it

solves when it can’t access dynamic content, filter out

unwanted information or breaks when websites inevitably

change. What you need is intelligent software robots that

automatically interact with and pull data from disparate

websites and portals—and then deliver it in near-real time,

constantly updating and integrating the data with your

systems and decision-making processes.

The Solution: Robotic Process Automation for Web Data Extraction

Kofax Kapow™ robotic process automation (RPA) is the

market-leading solution automatically collecting publically

available web data—including industry sector and

government data, news, online court and criminal records,

regulatory filings, consumer information, operational data

and more. Using software robots instead of web scraping

scripts or manual efforts means you can:

� Streamline the extraction of large volumes of data

� Eliminate unwanted data

� Continually monitor websites and portals for changes in

key data sources

� Implement robots in hours… all with a no-coding

approach

The Kapow robot design studio environment is powerful

enough for IT developers but easy enough for a business

analyst to use. Through the Kapow visual design studio, a

user quickly builds software robots that mimic what a user

does, trigger responses and communicate across virtually

any web site, portal or enterprise system. The ability to build

robots live enables designers to test and see immediately

how the data is being extracted from a website and

processed.

“We have accelerated the data extraction, transformation and delivery process by about 90% with Kofax Kapow. In addition, the entire process is much more user-friendly: Our people no longer have to spend hours visiting different websites to collect information or spend time formatting and consolidating that data, and they no longer have to contend with clunky spreadsheets.” Andreas Heizmann, Senior Consultant, Farner

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Key Capabilities

� Versatile software robotics: Kapow robots interact with

virtually any web site or enterprise application, trigger

responses, apply business rules and communicate with

systems just like humans, only without breaks or mistakes

and at much lower cost

� Superior scalability and proven large scale web robot

automation deployments: Hundreds of organizations rely

on Kapow, and many have deployed thousands of robots

that interact with web sites to intelligently collect,

transform and deliver valuable information from the web

and other sources

� Unified design tool with live interactive robot building:

point-and-click robot building where business analysts and

developers interact with web sites and applications as they

build out a process to collect, transform and deliver data,

all without coding.

� Robot management and built in analytics: Easily manage

and monitor large robot deployments, detect problems and

schedule robots to run

Benefits

� Eliminate existing manual web data collection processes:

Eliminate inefficient manual data collection processes

involving low-cost web scraping tools and custom in-house

coding

� Power up your services and offerings with better data:

Acquire and integrate data such as background checks, risk

screening services, fraud protection services, consumer

banking services and research offerings into your service

offerings

� Ensure accurate information: Get rid of all the manual work

associated with collecting and cleansing data

� Deliver better research and insight to your clients: New and

more frequent updates of data leads to be better business

insight and decisions for your clients

� Disrupt your industry: Leapfrog the competition by

extracting, transforming and delivering cleaner and larger

sets of data from the web

� Better track your competitors and customers: Set up robots

to collect near real-time data from the web including

competitive and pricing data; and to monitor partner

channels to protect your brand

Putting Intelligent Robots to Work

What can a market-leading web data extraction solution do

for you? Think about how your organization currently

collects, cleanses and makes use of data from the web.

� Information research and consultancy organizations

power up their research services by continually expanding

the depth and breadth of industry data and analysis

� Screening and risk management service providers deploy

software robots to automatically gather data on

individuals against thousands of sites including criminal

record sites, sex offender registries, sanction lists,

academic institutions and professional association

websites

� Online service oriented businesses like property tax

servicing automatically collect current and delinquent tax

data from thousands of tax collection agencies across the

country

� Disruptive businesses within banking and insurance

leverage robots as part of delivering disruptive online

banking services and consumer apps that connect banks,

consumers and applications

� Service oriented businesses to the retail industry use

robots to offer incredibly valuable services that rely on the

collection of competitive price information, tracking and

monitoring partner selling arrangements and monitoring

online fraud activity

� Retail, manufacturers and distributors automatically

collect competitive intelligence about products and

pricing or visibility into their channels and customers

Kapow design studio is a powerful design tool that lets robot designers interact with live web sites and applications as they build out a process to collect, transform and deliver data.

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Customer Success Story: Global Research and Consultancy Company

Challenge

Clients from all over the world rely on this global

research and consultancy company for trusted insights

on every sector of the global energy, metals and

mining industries. To keep its research services ahead

of the competition, the company continually expands

the depth and breadth of its industry data and analysis.

Recently, the company identified an opportunity to

deliver new insight to clients by creating a unique

upstream oil and gas offering, The North America Well

Analysis Tool, which reports on the performance of oil

wells across the continental United States.

Solution

The global research and consultancy company has

reduced time spent on data collection by 95%,

empowering its analysts to unlock new insights from

large amounts of oil and gas data with a streamlined

approach to information retrieval, driven by the Kofax

Kapow RPA solution.

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

“We have been able to dramatically increase the size of the data set that forms the core of our Well Analysis Tool, which now comprises approximately 16 billion data points. It is the largest single data set that we’ve ever compiled—and it’s something that would have been impossible for us to put together without Kapow.”— Senior Manager Data Operations

Discover more about Kofax Kapow at kofax.com/web-data-extraction